The Shape of the Cage
by Jelynne
Summary: Neji has spent most of his life watching Hinata, but it wasn't until recently that he's actually begun to see.


I continue to not own Naruto, I just play with the characters a bit then put them back. 

The Hyuuga family speak so incredibly formally, my goodness. Thus, honourifics have been left carefully intact, and what people _don't_ say is as important as what they _do_.

This story contains spoilers for the Chuunin Exams arc, and the Valley of the End arc, as well as for post-timeskip Neji, Hinata, Kiba, Shino, and Akamaru.

* * *

**The Shape of the Cage**

* * *

Neji doesn't know why he's always the one sent to fetch Hinata when the rest of the family isn't sure where she is. It's always been that way for the last ten years or so, though. Even after what happened at their chuunin exam a few months ago, they still send him. Occasionally now, whenever he's in a certain mood, he wonders how they managed to find her while he was in the hospital a few weeks ago, or how they find her when he's away on missions. 

To his surprise, Hinata is not in the garden. It's become her retreat in the summer months, and on a bright clear day like this one she should have been curled with her notes and scrolls at the foot of one of the tall, flowering bushes or in the gazebo by the pond.

She had certainly been there today though, he notes. The ducks are eyeing him in a way that says that they'd only recently finished squabbling over the last of the breadcrumbs and that they hoped he'd provide the next round. And a scroll, apparently dropped as she was leaving, rests in the grass. Idly, Neji picks it up and unrolls it just enough to read the titles.

Water jutsu, and fairly advanced ones, too. He doesn't recognize it as being from the Hyuuga family collection. She must have gotten it from her jounin-sensei.

Neji doesn't know why he's always the one sent to fetch Hinata when the rest of the family isn't sure where she is because she's rarely ever difficult to locate, even when she's not where he first expects her to be.

He finds Hinata seated on the floor in one of the more rarely-used common rooms near the garden. She's frowning with slightly pursed lips down at a partially-filled vase on the floor in front of her, with small not quite messy heaps of cut flowers and leaves spread out before her. She barely even glances up as he enters the room.

"Good afternoon, Neji-niisan." Her greeting is automatic, her gaze not moving from the arrangement.

Her guard is almost completely down, and she doesn't seem to have noticed. It has been that way for many years. He can make her nervous, make her stutter, make her stumble simply by staring at her in the right way, but only once has she ever raised her guard against him. It used to infuriate him, how unafraid of him she is. Now he isn't sure what it makes him feel, but it isn't angry.

"You dropped this outside." He holds out the scroll he found by the gazebo.

"Ah, thank you for finding it." She offers him a faint, wavering smile as she takes the scroll and tucks it away somewhere, then goes back to frowning at the vase.

His curiosity piqued, Neji asks "What are you doing?"

She glances up at him. "Madoka-obasan's hip has been bothering her a lot this week, so she can't go out," Hinata explains. Absently, she picks up a flower from the floor and starts twirling it in her fingers. "I thought she might like something from the garden to brighten her room."

Neji nods as Hinata unconsciously starts picking the flower apart. Madoka-obasan, though not actually their aunt, was a branch-house member, and a retired kunoichi. Her hip had been injured long before either he or Hinata had been born, and had never healed right. Even on a good day, she walks slowly and painfully with the aid of a cane. And as she ages, good days occur less and less often, confining the woman to her room.

He hadn't even realized Hinata had been paying close enough attention to the branch house members to have noticed. But then, she sometimes drifts about the branch house's area of the Hyuuga compound like a ghost, escaping her father's presence in the main house. Perhaps she has been paying more attention on those occasions than he had thought.

"It's not very good though," Hinata says mournfully, oblivious to the flower pieces and pollen that now litter her lap. "It doesn't look like one of Mother's at all."

Those words were more than enough to break Neji out of his train of thought. Hinata rarely, if ever, speaks about her mother.

"Your mother spent more than a decade honing her talent," he comments.

"I suppose." Hinata picks up another flower, and inserts it into the arrangement, adjusting it fussily.

Neji sighs. "I was sent to fetch you." He doesn't like admitting it, it makes him sound like some sort of servant, a mere errand-boy. His distaste renders the words flat and chill.

"I know," she says, and he can tell that her gentle, saddened tone is more of a response to his voice than to his actual words. She tips her head to the side, gazing at the vase, then adds another flower. "Hanabi just mastered the next stage of juuken. Father wants to show me how much better than me she is." There is no bitterness in Hinata's voice or face, even though her sister has mastered this stage nearly a full year before Hinata herself did.

She makes no move to stand.

Neji watches as Hinata rearranges the contents of the vase. "Hanabi will be entering the Academy in the fall."

"Yes," Hinata agrees.

Hiashi has taught Hanabi at home, keeping her out of the Ninja Academy as long as he can manage to so that he can supervise every aspect of her training personally. But for her to become a ninja of Konoha, she has to go to the school. There's no way around that rule, much as Hiashi had tried to find one. If he wants her to be in the next group of graduating genin, he is already pushing it by not having enrolled her that spring.

"You know what is going to happen when she joins the other students." It's not a question, it doesn't need to be.

"She is going to lose." Hinata's voice is calm and her gaze does not move from the flowers before her. "Very badly. And repeatedly."

Neji isn't surprised that Hinata has foreseen exactly what he has. For all her progress and all her training, Hanabi has never yet fought against a serious opponent, nor has she ever been in anything even approaching a real fight. And she has more than enough of the Hyuuga pride and arrogance to get herself into one - just as Neji's had him when he entered the school - most likely within days of entering the Academy.

And she will just as promptly get herself beaten soundly. Real opponents don't wait for you to carefully and perfectly form seals. Real opponents won't let you pick up your kunai again if you drop it. And, most of all, real opponents generally don't just stand still and let you hit them.

Hanabi has not yet learned these things. And even if her father has blinded himself to these facts, Neji and Hinata have not. They can't.

"Even so, your father is looking for you." Hiashi is looking, but Neji is the one sent. He doubts his uncle would even know where to begin looking for his eldest child, should he ever attempt the search himself.

Hinata nods. "I'll finish this, and then we'll go." Absently, she picks the leaves off a flower's stem. "There's still something missing."

Neji bends down to pick up the vase. Bringing it up to his eye level, he rotates it, studying her arrangement. "It's pleasing."

"Something's missing," she insists, reaching up to take it as he hands it back. Her sleeve falls back at the gesture, exposing her forearm.

Dark, fresh-looking, hand-sized bruises mark the pale skin of her inner arm.

The family recipe for healing salve is an ancient and very effective one. Her bruises from sparring with her team yesterday should have been more than half-healed already.

"Why haven't you taken care of those?" he asks, frowning darkly.

"So that I remember to block correctly next time." Hinata sets the vase back on the floor in front of her. She doesn't pull her sleeve back down.

Neji continues frowning down at her as she turns the vase this way and that. She pretends not to notice, though her hands are starting to move in that fluttering, flustered way he recognises as uncertainty. Finally, he sighs.

"White."

"What?" Hinata looks up at him, startled.

"Your arrangement," he explains. "It has no white."

"Oh." She looks from him back down to the flowers, and her face suddenly lights with comprehension. "Oh!"

Deftly she gathers up several sprays of small white flowers, and a large white rose. Then she gently slots them into her creation.

"Now it's finished." He watches her as she gazes down at it in satisfaction for a moment before she picks it up and stands. "I'll go see Father now."

Neji finds himself simply following after her as she goes, not knowing why.

* * *

"Neji, what's the ocean like?" Hanabi asks one winter evening. 

Neji is a little startled by the suddenness of the question. He is here - at his uncle's request - in this warm, quiet room of the main house to help Hanabi with her calligraphy, all other teachers having given up in despair. He is beginning to see why. Hinata is also here, seated on a cushion in the corner and repairing a tear in her jacket. It's not something she will let the servants do for her. Her stitches are minuscule and even.

Hinata's calligraphy, he knows, is elegant and precise, if a little hesitant at times. She has not been asked to help.

"Neji!" Hanabi prods. She's leaning well into his personal space, her brush - overfilled with ink - dripping fat blotches onto his demonstration paper. There is a bandage taped to her forehead just over her left eye, and a fist-sized bruise spread across her chin.

It is no longer normal to see Hanabi uninjured. Hiashi believes she is being bullied. Neji believes that she is daring the other children to fight her. Whatever Hinata believes, she keeps it to herself.

"The ocean?" he asks.

"Yes, the ocean!" Hanabi nods emphatically. Ink spatters widely across the paper with the motion. "What's it like?"

Neji's most recent mission took him to the seaside. He can only assume that this is what has prompted Hanabi's line of questioning.

He suddenly notices that Hinata is listening intently, even though she's pretending to be completely absorbed in her sewing. And abruptly he realizes a truth so simple that it had escaped his notice.

Hanabi has never been more than half a day's run away from Konoha. And though Hinata has been slightly further, perhaps even as far as a full day's run, she's still never gone anywhere near to the borders of Fire Country. Nor will she.

Comprehension spreads within him. If he is foolish enough to get himself killed, the curse seal on his forehead that he hates so much will simply and irrevocably destroy all traces of the byakugan within him. The clan secrets would be kept safe, forever. He can travel wherever he and the clan wills. But Hinata and Hanabi have no such protection. Their unmarked brows have bound them jealously to Konoha, and they will always be kept securely close to it and the clan unless Hiashi lifts his hand to mark them as Neji has been.

The sudden revelation is momentarily staggering, and Neji finds himself blinking at Hanabi with a poleaxed expression. For her part - having never seen anything like that particular expression on her elder cousin's face before - Hanabi dissolves into shocked giggles.

"Don't tell me you've forgotten," she manages somehow.

Hinata, as is so often the case lately, remains silent, but curiosity is written large across her face. Her mending lies forgotten in her lap.

Collecting the now slightly tattered shreds of his dignity, Neji redirects his gaze to the now utterly ruined paper sitting in front of him. Hanabi has dropped her paintbrush in order to cover her giggles with her hands, and a slow spread of pooling ink is soaking into the formerly pristine surface.

"No, I haven't forgotten."

"Neji-niisan was there on a mission, Hanabi-chan," Hinata's voice is gentle, but it instantly stills her sister's gigging, "not a sight-seeing trip."

Hanabi pouts, and picks at the bandage across the back of her hand. "That doesn't mean he didn't see it, 'neechan," she protests. "Right, Neji?"

Against his will, one corner of Neji's mouth quirks up into a near-smile. "Yes, I saw it," he agrees, and resists the urge to pet Hanabi's hair as if she were far younger than she was. She hates it when anyone does it, and he doesn't need ink all over his clothes.

"Then tell me what it was like." A definite note of pleading has entered Hanabi's voice. "Please, Neji?"

The almost-smile Neji wears stays in place. Hanabi so rarely uses the word 'please'. It strikes him, just how much his cousin wants to know.

She may never see the sea herself.

Taking a deep breath, Neji begins to try to describe the incredible vastness of the ocean to those who have never seen any body of water larger than a lake that could be walked around in an hour or so.

The next time a mission takes him to the sea, Neji brings back a string of cowrie shells for Hanabi, and a comb inlaid with a pattern of mother-of-pearl for Hinata.

* * *

Neji doesn't know if Hinata is capable of performing a kaiten like he can, but it's impossible to miss noticing how her suiton shield mimics it. The water makes a sound like river-rapids as it spins in a protective dome around her. Hinata is serene in the centre of it all, her hands folded in front of her as she stands and waits. 

Hinata's second chuunin exam has been very little like her first. Neji is certain that even if she loses her next match his cousin will be promoted based on this fight.

This opponent has obviously been warned about getting too close to a Hyuuga, but time and again in their match Hinata has either tempted or taunted him into the reach of her juuken. Her opponent is badly injured, but he's hiding it well.

Neji spares a glance from the match to Hanabi, who is seated beside him. She's leaning forward, intent on the fight, the engorged veins of an activated byakugan clearly showing around her eyes. There is a split in her lower lip that wasn't there at breakfast.

Her genin team was only a handful of missions short from qualifying to enter this exam, a fact that Hanabi appears to resent in a vague, unformed way. Neji considers it just as well. The sisters have never fought against each other, and he doesn't wish to know what the results of such a fight would be.

Besides, Hanabi already challenges chuunin to fight. She wins slightly less than half the time. By next year, and the next chuunin exam in Konoha, she'll probably be winning most of the time. Though by then, Neji expects that she'll have moved on to challenging jounin.

Neji turns his attention back to the match. It can't go on much longer.

To anyone but another Hyuuga with their byakugan activated, Hinata's shield renders her as nothing but an indistinct shape behind the water. Neji watches her hands move, forming seals.

Gaps open in the spinning, foam-flecked water. To anyone who has not seen her making seals, it looks like the result of a lapse of concentration, perhaps of a tiring opponent.

A trap then. Her opponent is likely growing desperate by now, it's unlikely that he'll pass up this seemingly golden opportunity. This is the first actual trap Hinata has used in the fight, and Neji wonders what she is thinking.

The man in the arena with her coughs once, quickly, into his hand. Neji almost admires his control. Almost. The foreign genin hides the way he's wiping his hand off on his pants by reaching for his kunai holster. It's uncertain who the man hopes to hide it from, since Hinata's byakugan would be able to see the damage she's done just as well as Neji's can. But perhaps the man doesn't realize that.

The gaps in Hinata's shield would be perfect for shuriken, being small and narrow, and only barely visible. To be sure to strike them just right with a larger weapon, the man is going to have to get much closer. His kunai are already clenched in his hand as he springs into motion, charging the bubble of water before him. As soon as he's within a few feet, he throws, aiming for the tempting targets presented to him, and the woman beyond.

Hinata's hands move.

The water roars, batting aside the knives as if they were no more than leaves as it rears up and becomes something like a tidal wave. It smashes into Hinata's opponent with the force of a wall. The man manages to lessen the impact with a panicked jump backwards, but he still receives a strong blow from being at such close range. He lands badly, stumbling to his knees. Hinata stands at the edge of where her suiton has carved a circle into the ground, her hands still held out in the motion that had pushed the water away from herself, breathing hard.

Neji glances away to scan the seats for his uncle. He finds him easily, seated high in the stands with the other clan heads. Hiashi sits back in his seat, arms crossed tightly over his chest, his expression studiously blank. Only a faint line between his brows indicates that the expression he has smoothed away is a frown.

Hiashi's face is always either frowning or coldly blank when he looks at Hinata, Neji has noticed. It's not an expression he wears for Hanabi or for Neji. Focussing to his side once again, Neji regards his younger cousin, like a smaller female copy of himself, of Hiashi.

Perhaps Hinata's curse, he thinks as he looks back down to the field below, is that she has always looked too much like her mother.

She certainly looks nothing like her father right now, standing down there in that arena with water droplets scattered over her dark hair like stars across the sky.

Her opponent tries a jutsu, an earth type meant to drive spikes of rock up beneath and hopefully through Hinata, but the execution is clumsy and slow. Hinata dances out of the way of the spears. Neji remembers facing a similar attack only a few months ago himself, at his own second chuunin exam. Though he had simply jumped away, rather than dodging on the ground the way Hinata just has.

The Hyuuga weakness is ranged attacks, as Neji knows all too well. If he forgets, all he has to do is touch the scar on his shoulder to remember. Just before winning the match that had granted him his chuunin status, he had done just that. Hinata counters that weakness the same way that he does; she shields herself, she dodges, she anticipates. Hanabi deals with their weakness differently. Rather than shielding or protecting herself from an opponent using ranged attacks against her, she dives in brashly, closing whatever distance standing between herself and her opposition with a brutal disregard for any of the possible consequences of doing so. Neji has wondered, sometimes, where she got that recklessness from.

Beside Neji, Hanabi leans even further forward towards the match, resting her hands on the back of the seat in front of her. Apparently without thinking about it, she licks the split in her lower lip, all of her concentration seemingly on the fight below.

Hinata knocks her opponent back to the ground with a well-placed kick as he tries to follow up his jutsu with an attack.

"You're going to die if you don't stop soon," she tells him hesitantly, and with a faint look of concern, though she doesn't relax her stance. Her voice doesn't carry to the seats Neji and Hanabi sit in, but he reads her lips easily. "You should give up."

"Shut up, bitch!" her opponent snaps at her, slowly beginning to stand again. It's an order he may regret as his vehemence makes him abruptly double over, racked with thick coughs.

"Your right lung is filling with blood." Hinata stands up straighter from her crouch, though her hands are still held in ready position. "If you don't get attention for it soon, y-you're going to drown in it."

It's only by straining his focus that Neji can see that her hands are shaking.

Her opponent has no answer, having crumpled to his knees, hunching forward with one hand on his chest, and the other over his mouth. He is still coughing, and now there is no hiding the blood splattering his hand or staining his lips and chin.

Hinata blinks slowly, tipping her head slightly to the side as she looks through the man before her. Then she takes two careful steps backward, and clasps her hands in front of her before turning her face to the judge of the fight, her byakugan deactivating as she does.

Her opponent's every breath is a cough, all of the control he had used to keep from doing so earlier gone. The thick, wet sound of his hacking carries far further than Hinata's voice had.

The hit had been a lucky one, a seemingly glancing blow to the man's chest early in the match. However, the nature of the clan's gentle fist renders even a glancing blow deadly serious. Her adversary's lung had been slowly filling with blood ever since.

As the judge waves the medical team standing by onto the field, Hanabi sits up from her hunched-forward position.

"Neji, who is that man with the Kazekage?" she asks. "He's been staring at us for most of Hinata-neechan's fight."

Surprised, Neji directs his focus upwards and to his left, to the high balcony where the Kages sit to watch the chuunin matches. The Kazekage is a rail-thin, jumpily nervous man who is forever tapping his fingers or wringing his hands. It's hard to tell whether the source of his nervousness is this first official visit to Konoha since Suna had attacked them, or his escort.

Hanabi is right, the Kazekage's bodyguard is looking at them, though it's less like staring and more like a thoughtful sort of watchfulness. It would certainly look like staring to anyone who didn't already know about the man's tendency to not blink quite often enough. Neji recognizes him immediately.

"That is Sabaku no Gaara," he tells Hanabi, wondering why, of all the people attending the matches today, Garra would choose to watch the two of them.

"Sabaku no Gaara?" Hanabi echoes, frowning faintly. Her expression clears as memory strikes her. "The one who fought the Uchiha last time?"

Neji nods.

"He became a jounin so quickly," Hanabi muses. Her face is thoughtful, and though it appears that she's watching the medical team work down on the field, Neji knows her attention is actually directed elsewhere, to the balcony above.

"Is he very strong?" she asks.

Neji still remembers watching Lee and Gaara fight, just over a year ago. And if the story Lee tells of his and Gaara's fight against a Sound-nin is true, the sand-nin has only gotten better since then.

"Yes, very strong," he agrees.

"Ah." There is a tone in that syllable that sets off a vague worry in Neji that he doesn't like as his cousin turns in her seat to look up at the balcony and the man looking down at them. He likes even less the half-smile she wears as she does so. She had worn a very similar smile as she had walked past him in the hall on her way out after breakfast that morning.

After the matches are over for the day, Hanabi manages to slip away from Neji, vanishing somewhere in the exiting crowd. She doesn't return to the Hyuuga compound until well after dark.

When she does finally come back, she is limping on both legs, carefully holding a visibly swollen elbow. Her shirt is stained with blood from a perfectly straight cut that angles from just below her collarbone to her shoulder, and the palms of both her hands have been abraded bloody.

There is a wide smear of blood mixed with something gritty across her cheek, and she still wears the same half-smile, though now it seems somehow pleased.

Hinata, her own injuries from earlier that day neatly bandaged, stands on an upstairs balcony and watches her sister limp home. Neji stands just behind her, having come to congratulate her on her winning match, and watches her clutch the railing hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

"She's so reckless," Hinata says softly at last, breaking the silence between them. There is something like affection in her voice, something like fear, and something like envy.

It's a tone Neji has only ever heard her apply to one other person before. He has never understood what it means.

* * *

As it always seems to do, the festival has made Konoha's streets crowded and noisy. A myriad of booths have been set up, and it seems like the entire population of the town has come out to have some fun. Neji is no exception, though his slow progress has the slight flavour of work to it since he is here to escort his cousins. 

Hinata has been growing out her hair. It brushes just past her shoulders when its loose, straight and black and even. Today, though, she has carefully done it up to go with the pale green kimono she is wearing.

Since the last chuunin exams, Hanabi has cut her once waist-length hair short, in a ruler-straight line just below the level of her chin. She has refused to wear a kimono today, opting instead to wear a grey-blue hakama that used to belong to Neji before he outgrew it.

At the moment, Hanabi is also the sister that bears more watching, since she's found her genin teammates. Or perhaps they found her, it would be difficult to say. Now the three are engaged in some sort of scattered conversation, the two boys more or less following Hanabi as she darts about from booth to booth and back to them.

Through the noise of the crowd it's impossible to tell what they're talking about, but Neji thinks it's safe to assume the conversation has to do with missions or training. He watches the trio long enough to make certain that Hanabi seems unlikely to challenge someone to a fight in the middle of the street - at least for the moment - and turns to glance at Hinata.

Hinata is watching Hanabi, chewing lightly on her lower lip. Or, to be more accurate as Neji follows the line of her gaze, she is watching her sister's hands.

Hanabi's only jewelry today besides a mostly tucked away and hidden string of shells at her neck is a pair of matching bracelets made of black volcanic glass. They had been brought to her only the night before, along with a letter she had let no one else read, by the Suna liaison to Konoha.

The liaison was new, sent to temporarily replace the previous one who had been suddenly called back to Suna. Neji has heard that the liaison was called home because the council there is electing a new Kazekage, though what has happened to the previous one is unclear.

All Neji really knows for certain is that the Hyuuga compound was one of the new liaison's first stops in Konoha after seeing the Hokage, and that he had refused to give the package he had protectively carried to anyone but Hanabi.

Neji also knows - from a previous mission that took him to Suna - that even the smallest polished piece of black glass is insanely expensive, not only because of the rarity of obsidian in Wind Country, but because each must be painstakingly hand-ground to smoothness with sand, a process that can often take months. It is far simpler to make a wickedly sharp blade with a well-placed tap of a tool than to sit for weeks and abrade it smooth.

Hinata frowns and bites her lip as she looks at her sister's new three-finger wide bracelets, smooth and solid, and Neji thinks that this is perhaps something she knows as well.

Obsidian is as much a weapon as it is beautiful.

Hanabi, wearing sand-smoothed black glass bracelets, darts about the festival, laughing with her teammates. Neji already knows that she regularly receives letters from Suna, letters she never lets anyone else read. This is the first gift that he knows of.

Hinata is afraid. Neji can read it more in the twist and fold of her fingers than her face as she watches her sister run away.

Hanabi vanishes into the crowd, and Hinata sighs softly, little more than a faint puff of air from her lips.

"You're worried about her," Neji observes.

Hinata starts as if she's forgotten he was there, and a faint flush of embarrassment shows across her cheeks as she turns to look up at him.

"I am," she admits softly.

Neji arches an eyebrow. "Why now? Hanabi is always Hanabi."

Hinata's gaze drifts away from him as she folds and unfolds her hands. "She spoke to Father this morning. She wants to go to Suna." She pauses, biting her lip for a moment. "She wants to attend the inauguration of the new Kazekage."

There is very little doubt as to who the next Kazekage will be.

The world falls into a dangerous new shape. Hanabi has to have known what she was asking.

"But to go, she would have to be..." Without his even noticing, Neji's hand creeps up as if to touch the hitai-ate that he wears even today.

"Father refused," Hinata interrupts, her soft voice somehow cutting through his. "He said that he would never even consider it, and that Hanabi should not have even thought of asking such a thing."

"What happened?" Neji presses.

"They fought." As they always do for him, it is Hinata's eyes that betray her unhappiness. "It was horrible." Her hands are folded so tightly her fingers look bloodless. "They fought, and Hanabi said such terrible things about Father and the family, and Father..." She unfolds her hands, and presses white fingertips to her cheeks beneath her eyes. Neji recognizes it as an old trick of hers to keep from crying.

He is unaccountably afraid of the thought of her tears. He has not seen or heard of her crying since the year she turned five. "Hinata-sama?"

Hinata stares at the ground, several inches to the right of Neji's feet. "Father said that Hanabi was behaving like a child, and that she should act in a manner more befitting a clan heir," she all but whispers, refusing to raise her eyes.

Today there is a festival in Konoha, and the streets are crowded and noisy all around them, but Neji suddenly feels as if he and Hinata are stopped in time, standing in a bubble of ringing silence while the world goes on outside without them.

There is not enough air anymore. "Hinata-sama..."

"Hanabi said that she didn't need to, because she wasn't the heir, and never wanted to be the heir anyway, and called father stupid as well as blind," Hinata says as if he had never spoken at all. "Then she stormed out, calling Father every possible name she could think of on the way."

At least now the reason why Hanabi had been standing - unusually still, for her - out in the courtyard when Neji had arrived to collect the sisters, and why inside the entranceway to the main house the silence had hung so heavily between Hiashi and Hinata that it had an almost physical presence.

Hinata looks up at him, and something flickers across her eyes at what she somehow reads in his face despite his effort to keep it blank.

"It's alright, Neji." From somewhere she summons a faint smile as she pats him gently on the arm. "I've known for a long time that Father sees me as an unfit heir."

There are a great many things that Neji would have said if the two of them had been alone now. But they are not alone, they are surrounded on all sides by other people, and in front of others, especially strangers, there are a great many things that cannot be said.

Neji bows his head down to the tiny creature that is his cousin, that is the girl he once nearly killed, that is the woman he is slowly coming to understand, and says simply "You are the only heir, Hinata."

Hinata's hand is still on his arm, as light and as fragile as a bird's wing as she closes her eyes and accepts all of the words he did not say. He watches as she squares her shoulders under the weight of what he has just given her before she opens her eyes again.

"Thank you, Neji." She smiles softly, and her hand squeezes his arm faintly before lifting away. It is only then that she turns away from him, bending her attention back to the festival.

"I think I'll go get some odango from that booth," she says, waving a hand in the appropriate direction. "Would you like me to get you some too, Neji-niisan?"

Neji shakes his head, and watches as she makes her way through the crowds towards the booth. Just as she is about to reach it, something large, furry, and off-white shoulders past him as a familiar voice calls her name.

He watches as Hinata jumps in surprise, turning to flusteredly greet Kiba as he jumps down from his spot on Akamaru's back, dragging Shino along with him by a grip on the back of his jacket. It's impossible to hear through the noise of the crowd, even harder to read lips when people keep passing in between them, so Neji reads their expressions instead.

Kiba is grinning wide enough to just about split his face as he all but bounds around, obviously puffed up with pride at locating both his teammates in the bustle of the crowds. However, his attempt at bounding is hampered by the fact that he has yet to release his hold on the back of Shino's jacket.

Neji sighs, and wonders if there will ever be a day when Kiba does not remind him of some overgrown puppy when he's around his teammates.

Hinata's hand is up over her mouth, covering her giggles, as Shino finally manages to shrug free and inclines his head to her, apparently offering a greeting. For some reason, this prompts Kiba to smack the other boy across the shoulder before he abruptly whirls to give Hinata his own ferally-grinning proper hellos.

Hinata's smile in response is bright as she returns each man's greeting, and she reaches up to scratch Akamaru's muzzle. The massive canine responds by lolling his tongue out in a doggish grin and inclining his head - obviously requesting to be scratched behind the ear. Hinata, still smiling, complies.

Hinata smiles for her team in a way she never does for her family. For her teammates, she has a gently sweet, shy smile that they seem to deliberately try to coax out of her every chance they get. She rarely ever smiles for her family, and when she does it's laid on carefully, wavering at the edges, unsure and afraid of judgement. Until the first time he had really watched her together with her team, Neji had never realized that Hinata could smile any other way.

Akamaru is panting and looking half blissed-out as Hinata scratches, and though Shino is still hidden somewhere in his jacket and hood, his hands stuffed into his pockets, he's standing close enough to his teammate that his shoulder nearly brushes hers. Kiba is bounding around both of them and gesculating wildly, apparently recounting some story. Or perhaps he's still bragging about finding them.

Shino's head moves slightly as he apparently says something that makes Hinata pause in scratching and turn faintly pink across the cheeks. The shade darkens as Kiba stops mid-bound to agree with whatever Shino said. His frank stare makes it clear that they've just complimented Hinata's appearance as he carefully reaches to touch the mother-of-pearl inlaid comb she has used to fasten her hair with a single clawed forefinger.

Neji has spent nearly his entire life watching his cousin. In wonder, in bewilderment, in anger, in resentment, in awe, and in respect he has watched her through the years.

Now though, he has decided to watch her with anticipation, waiting for the day that she finally unfurls her tightly folded wings and takes to the sky.


End file.
